This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There’s not a lot out there. I assume that there’s probably limited demand – flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it’s not a genre with many decent entrants.
Kenshi-style games. I’m not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.
It’s not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse – don’t remember whether it was this community or not – trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn’t a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don’t have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.
I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier – maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn’t as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don’t think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.
There’s a reliable way to combat scalping in general. Start selling the item at a high price or in larger quantity and then cut the price whenever sales drop off.
Scalpers can only make money by scalping something when it is being sold below what the market is willing to pay for it in the quantity in which it is available.
On a non-economic note, I’d add that I don’t think I’d want to buy an easily-modified Linux computer system from some random person unless I planned to wipe it. How do you know that the thing hasn’t been rootkitted?
I’m just curious if anyone else tried to get one of the Limited Edition Steam Decks before they sold out. I tried for it (on 3 devices) but kept getting error messages until it sold out. I just ordered the 1 TB edition instead....
As a piece of hardware and platform, I like it. I think that the OLED screen is definitely a win too.
But I carry a laptop and tablet (EDIT: and smartphone) with me already, and I rarely game much when out and about. Just not enough additional utility provided by the thing.
You start out a bit fragile in the game. Qud tends to, IME, get easier over time (though one needs to learn how to deal with the goatfolk when one runs into them).
Giant centipedes are generally harder than crocodiles and snapjaws. Giant beetles too.
Start in Joppa, which is the default.
Can you kill a single crocodile in the nearby salt marshes in surrounding maps?
If so, you’re good. Just don’t get aggressive. Don’t fight more than one at once. Back off if you’re low on health and heal up – important for the game in general. You can run if things start to go badly (especially if you take starting perks perks that let you move more quickly).
You can start with some kind of “burst” ability. Like, a marauder has the ability to lop a limb off, which will not only gimp the enemy in various ways but cause bleeding for a while. Espers can start with damage-causing abilities like Freezing Ray or Light Manipulation. Using that to kill the first few monsters and letting the ability recharge after each is desirable.
If you want to try to get a starting level of two, go to talk to Argyve in the southwest corner of the starting map. Get his “find an artifact” quest. You can loot chests in houses in Joppa without angering the citizens if you close the doors first ((o)pen them again) so that nobody can see you. You’ll likely get an artifact or two, which lets you complete his first and second artifact quest.
IIRC, you can also get some experience from examining the statue in the northeast of the map and another on the map immediately to the north of the starting map.
In the north-western corner of the Joppa map, there’s a secret passage in the water that you’ll find if you walk in the water. That will take you to a tunnel that leads to the bottom level of Red Rock, gives you a reliable early way to get underground. I think that the enemies there are generally harder than the ones on the surface, but there are snapjaws, and they’re easier (and they also are a good source of dropped equipment for a starting player). Don’t go below the first level underground at first.
Don’t try to rush to the rust wells for Argyve. And you might want to gain a few levels before you do Red Rock for the warden of Joppa. Same, but more so for trying to cross the salt desert to the Six Day Stilt for the zealot who is also on the starting map.
I like Qud – didn’t at first – but I feel like it kinda plays out similarly each time, at least with the chimera-marauder build that I like. Like, I’m not really forced to deal with drastically-different situations each run, which is kind of a core element of roguelikes.
Given how much time they’ve had to think about branding, I’m not sure that this is necessarily the name that they’ll stick with. But I think that it’s probably – while this is in the news – a good move to get people looking at some channel that they do control, so that if they come up with something else, they can tell people about it.
I guess you could potentially make a device that appears to be a controller and translates keyboard/mouse with a couple USB inputs
They control the console, the OS, the controller hardware, and can require the console to connect to them. They already have the ability to push out controller firmware updates. They can have the controller cryptographically authenticate to the console and push blacklists to the console of keys that get leaked (like if someone somehow extracts a key from a legit controller and uses it to make a knockoff).
TLDR: It’s really really underbaked, should’ve delayed it like 6 months. I have refunded the game and returned back to C:S 1 with DLC unlocker.
You could also just put it on a list to keep an eye on and look at it in six months or a year later.
I think that a number of times, publishers put out a half-baked release but do ultimately see the issues at release fixed. Fallout 76 was horrendous at release, and while it’s still not Fallout 5, I think that the updates have made it a decent game. Cyberpunk 2077 also wasn’t ready at release, and while I haven’t looked at it recently, my understanding is that with updates and DLC, it’s also pretty decent. Paradox does have a history of titles that see a lot of post-release work.
I think that in many cases, the patientgamers crowd – wait at minimum a year after release before looking at a game – has the right idea. They may not get the absolute latest, blingiest stuff. But:
Many bugs are often fixed by then. You aren’t the guinea pig.
The hardware it runs on is cheaper and/or performance is better.
People will have done up wikis to refer to.
The game itself may cost less.
DLC is out. For many games – Paradox games in particular – a lot of the content is in the DLC, and the base game is kind of dwarfed by the DLC. For a number of these, a new title in a series isn’t going to be as good as the last before a lot of DLC has come out.
Mods are out. For some games, particularly on the PC, mods make the game vastly better.
I’m not saying that everyone should do that. But in this case, we knew going into the release – and the developer announced – that the performance wasn’t where they wanted it to be at release. So I think that this is a good candidate to wait on. Either they improve performance post-release or they won’t. Either way, you’ll know prior to purchase. Plus, hardware keeps getting faster, so to a certain degree, performance problems solve themselves.
Freelancer is one of my favourite games, and Discovery is my favourite Freelancer mod. Thought you fine folks might want to take a look at the trailer they’ve just put out....
We just had a discussion about the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there’s been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it’s kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn’t add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it’s a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman – an indie fighter combat game (not space – atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat – did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I’m thinking that maybe there’s room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of “Hollywood space” – fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around – were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don’t have that around any more.
There’s a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it’s that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn’t handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you’ve got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it’s just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we’re past that point.
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.[16] It holds the Guinness world record for the longest development for a video game, at 14 years and 44 days,[17] though this period was exceeded in 2022 by Beyond Good and Evil 2.[18]
I assume that the reason that the Guiness Book of World Records doesn’t accept Beyond Good and Evil 2 is that they probably require an actual release.
Duke Nukem Forever was released on June 14, 2011, and received mostly unfavorable reviews, with criticism for its graphics, dated humor and story, simplistic mechanics, and unpolished performance and design. It did not meet sales expectations but was deemed profitable by Take-Two Interactive, the owner of 2K Games.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[3] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.
Currently Star Citizen is at the #1 spot for the most money spent on a video game’s development on this list. And that’s including adjustment for inflation.
Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. Between April 2013 and April 2018, Ken pledged $4,495 to the project. The game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.
According to the game’s original pitch on Kickstarter, it would be a space sim with a co-op multiplayer game, an offline single-player experience, and a persistent universe. It’s since become a massively multiplayer online game and a separate single-player game with first-person shooter elements called Squadron 42, which RSI originally pitched as “A Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want.”
Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”
So if they still are on the hook to provide all that stuff and many people are in a similar situation to this guy, that’s a lot of merch that they gotta produce after they have done the game.
The good news is that work on the game is still under way. The bad news is that its actual release date is just as unclear as ever.
For those keeping track, that means it’s been almost fifteen years since Ubisoft released its first trailer for the game, which is longer than it took to get gaming’s other development-hell classic Duke Nukem Forever out the door.
The company made a big splash when it released a new trailer for the game at E3 2017, but at the time director Michel Ancel cautioned that the team was still at “day zero” of development. Following his departure from the company in 2020, reports emerged that Ancel was under investigation for his allegedly toxic management style.
It sounds a lot less like a joke and more like enormous project management problems.
I didn’t quote that bit, but that’s actually what he was upset about too.
For Lord, it’s no longer the game he thought he was getting. The first person mode is an especially hard sell. “I have [multiple sclerosis],” he told me. “My hands shake badly. I have tremors…They just recently confirmed that you have to do the first-person shooter thing to get through Squadron 42. I can’t do that, I just can’t do that. So my money’s stuck in a game I can’t possibly play.”
played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job
Yeah, it never really clicked for me, and I didn’t like the “faux online” aspect either. I bet that it’s probably pretty in VR, though.
I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It’s definitely my favorite of the bunch.
Ah, okay, I didn’t think that that’d be your cup of tea, because while the game does have fighters, it tends to favor large ship combat, and my take is that the dogfighting isn’t too elaborate – like, if you can leverage strafing in X2, the enemy AI isn’t all that great at predicting where you’ll be. There isn’t, I don’t know, breaking missile locks or whatever. Though I guess that exploiting dead zones in fields of fire is a thing. And there’s a management focus, and the ability to indirectly manage many ships. I hadn’t played much of X4 myself, though I did do X3 a fair bit.
Do you enjoy the fleet command aspect of it? There’s a game that I recall that felt more like a fleet naval combat simulator in space, not on the first-person dogfighting aspect. Lots of naval warfare-ish jargon, focus on sensor and counter-sensor stuff – I suspect that people who like something leaning a bit more milsim would like that. It was early access when I played it, but probably enough to have some fun with it. Let me find the name.
They flash through a lot of functionality in a few seconds quickly in the demo vids there on steam, but you can see the ship and weapon configuration, fleet and ship commands, system-specific damage control, some of the electronic warfare stuff, things like that.
So, I enjoyed what was there, but I can imagine someone finding the faux-naval jargon a bit opaque. Sort of like operating a naval group, with ships with specialized roles. The graphics are okay, but beauty isn’t their goal – they’re trying to do a combat environment in space.
I actually ran across it when looking for a non-space milsim fleet naval combat game, and was pleasantly-surprised.
I’m not big on the multplayer aspect
Yeah, ditto.
Starfield was a huge disappointment
I liked it, but then I wanted a Skyrim or Fallout 4 out of it, not a space combat game. Yeah, the space combat there isn’t much more than a pretty minigame.
But yeah the fleet combat part of X4 never quite got me interested beyond “if I make 100 fighters, I should be able to take out pretty much anything”.
Ah, okay. I was just trying to figure out how it differed from some of the other things you listed, and fleet combat was one. But the economic side is another, and, yeah, I can see the economic side of the X series being appealing if building a big space empire is a goal.
If you’re looking for a space economic sim, that’s entirely-absent from NEBULOUS, and in fact they even mention that up-front on the product page – they’re going for combat simulation. So it won’t fill that slot.
I’d guess that the idea here is that a “whale” is someone who will spend a lot of money on something. Historically, catching an (actual) whale meant that you’d caught something that was very valuable; my guess is that this is where the phrase came from. Whales were valuable because at the time, they were an economically-reasonable place to get oil. Fracking (or hydraulic fracturing) is a way to extract oil from the ground.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can see where they’re coming from. A “whale fracking operation” is not a standard term that I’ve ever heard before, though I get what the guy probably meant.
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
I think that most of the games that I’ve really enjoyed have been ones that tend towards the “full price” side money-wise, but which I have played for a long time, replayed a number of times, not just done a single pass. Gotten DLC on. Often modded.
Think:
Fallout 4
Oxygen Not Included
Caves of Qud
Civilization V
Stellaris
Noita
Kenshi
Nova Drift
Kerbal Space Program
Rimworld
Mount & Blade: Warband
The amount I’ve paid per hour of play on those is tiny.
My real constraint is the amount of time I have. I mean, I haven’t really been constrained by what it costs to play a game. I have a backlog of games that I’d be willing to play.
The waste, from a purely monetary standpoint, is overwhelmingly games that I buy and touch briefly, and don’t find myself playing at all. Frostpunk sounded neat, because I like similar genres (city-building), but I completely disliked the actual game, for example. A few Paradox games (Stellaris) I’ve really gotten into, but a number I’ve also found completely-uninteresting (Europa Universalis, say). There are apparently a number of Europeans who are extremely into the idea of their historic people taking over Europe, for example, and Paradox specializes in simulating those scenarios. I just don’t care about playing that out. Sudden Strike 4 – I’ve really enjoyed some real time tactics WW2 games, like Close Combat, but couldn’t stand the more arcade-oriented Sudden Strike 4.
If you could give me a Noita, but high resolution and with some neat new content and physics I’d happily pay $100.
I’ve played Nova Drift for about 180 hours. That game presently sells for $18. So I paid about ten cents an hour. The price of the game is a rounding error in terms of the entertainment I got from it. Paying ten times as much for a sequel or DLC comparable to the stuff in the original game would be fine as long as I were confident that I’d enjoy and play it as much as I did the original game.
Sudden Strike 4 is about $20. I played it, forcing myself back to it, made it to about an hour total. So I paid about $20 an hour, or about 200 times the rate for Nova Drift. And I didn’t enjoy that hour much.
In general, my preferred model would be for publishers to keep putting out DLC on highly-replayable games as long as people are interested in buying it: when I find something that I know I like, I want to be able to get more of it. If the Caves of Qud guy would hire more people to produce more content and just sell it as DLC, I’d be happy with that.
I like the theme, like the ambiance, like the open world, and absolutely hate the combat in that game. Have you ever played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? Same sort of setting and game, but turn-based, and significantly more-complex, and particularly since I see Rimworld on your list, I’m wondering if you might like it.
Welll…it depends. If you count DLC, there are games that have greatly outpaced inflation.
The Sims 4 costs nothing for the “base game”, but with all DLC – and that is still coming out – it’s presently about $1,100.
Another factor is that in many cases, the market has expanded. Like, in 1983, it wasn’t that common to see adults in the US playing video games. I am pretty sure that in a lot of countries, basically nobody was playing video games in 1983. in 2023, 40 years later, the situation is very different. The costs of making a video game are almost entirely fixed costs, separate from how many copies you sell.
So…if there is a game out that that many, many other people want to play, it’s going to sell a lot more copies.
I don’t really see the point in getting upset about a price, though – I agree with you on that. I mean, unless the game was misrepresented to you…it’s a competitive market out there. Either it’s worth it to you or it’s not, and if it’s not, then play something else. If someone is determinedly charging some very high price for a game in a genre, and a lot of people want to play that genre and it can be made profitably at a lower price, some other developer is probably going to show up sooner or later and add a competitor to the mix.
It’s free and open-source (though one of the devs put a build up for $20 on Steam, which basically amounts to a donation). I’d definitely recommend it to someone who enjoys Project Zomboid and Rimworld.
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
The question of pause-a-game-when-not-focused is a big question for me. I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer, though I’d at least like a toggle.
I run a Linux environment, with multiple workspaces. I can switch between workspaces by whacking a key combination. So I really, really frequently am swapping between them, even when playing games.
I totally understand how some people might want a game to auto-pause when they switch away from it. I remember once seeing a video recording of some guy who was handling support calls. He was playing video games in between calls, and every time a call came in, he would switch over to his support software and do work. Now, setting aside the question of whether his manager was okay with that, that’s a very legitimate use case where you’d want a game to auto-pause on switch. Otherwise, you have to manually pause and then switch.
On the other hand, I often want to switch away when the game is doing something time-consuming. Starfield can take a while to do a rest, and I’ll often be looking at something on another workspace while resting. I definitely don’t want the game to pause then, else I just have to sit there staring at a screen with a progress bar moving. Same thing with turn-based games that have an AI phase, where the AI is computing something. If a game has any moments with downtime, I’d like to be able to run it in the background without it pausing. It’s really annoying when a game developer tries to “helpfully” auto-pause the game, when I don’t want that. I’d be fine with that as a default, but if there’s no toggle, it’s really irritating (Starfield does have a toggle, albeit one hidden in a config file and without a UI widget for it).
On idles, I agree. Especially for turn-based games like Civilization, it’d be nice to at least have the option to forego idle animations, which would be a big battery usage saver for laptops. The only thing it should need to do, even in the foreground, if you’re not pushing buttons, is be playing music.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Unciv, but it’s a full open-source reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android and desktop OSes, using simple graphics. It really does drive home how much graphical fluff there is in the series – not that that’s necessarily bad, but it really is not necessary to play the game. And for a lot of people, it’d be nice to have battery-friendly games.
Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important.
At one point in my life, during the pre-Tivo era, I lived directly beneath the approach route for an airport. It wasn’t the highest-traffic airport out there, and you learn to just tune the airplanes out for most things – but the one thing that there wasn’t a great workaround for was the occasional snippet of television shows getting drowned out when they decided to have a critical bit of plot right when the 8:00 PM flight was coming in.
Modern video games with voice-acting do tend to mitigate this by having subtitles and turning them on by default, though. And video games usually do let you roll back to an earlier save, maybe lose a few minutes of play, but if you want badly enough to hear the thing, you can. So it’s not quite as bad as the television show, where missing the critical bit of a plot could be really irritating.
Hmm. I guess that’d work if you have a per-save-game list of cinematics. I was thinking of this more in the sense of games that have cinematics that are unlocked and accessible from the main menu.
There’s actually legitimately at least some functionality required there that exists on the console there that doesn’t on the PC. The consoles already have a console-level concept of a player-to-controller mapping. That doesn’t exist on the PC, so the individual game would need to implement it – it’s not entirely free.
A common approach on the PC to handling controllers is to assume that there is one player and that whichever controller is receiving input last is the controller to use. This deals nicely with the case where there are multiple specialized controllers used for different software packages, like “the user has a steering wheel, a flightstick, an XBox controller, a Playstation controller, and a Switch controller plugged in” case. Problem is, then you can’t go just assume that Controller 1 is the Player 1 controller, and Controller 2 is the Player 2 controller. That case doesn’t come up on consoles, because they constrain the controller situation so that you can’t do that, so the problem doesn’t arise on consoles.
I suppose that if you were hellbent on specifically setting this up, you could maybe do multiple VMs split onscreen, though last I looked, the situation for sharing 3d hardware across multiple VMs wasn’t great, and I am sure that it would be horribly inefficient, since each VM would be storing a duplicate copy of textures in VRAM. I have no idea how the PC version of Halo CE deals with weird aspect ratios.
It also wouldn’t have some integration like switching to a single large screen for cutscenes or the menu. But if you were just specifically hellbent on creating a multiplayer, single-screen Halo experience on the PC, you might be able to pull it off like that.
Another approach, if the hardware cost is acceptable, would be to have a laptop per player and then stream the output video to some multiplexing hardware that puts multiple screens on one TV. That would buy you per-player audio, which I don’t believe was possible on the original XBox release.
I always thought that it was intended to either simulate an old television or to make a scene look scarier, but looking at the wiki page I’ve linked to, it looks like there are a number of stylistic uses.
Oh, I get what you mean. So you want something like analog input for movement.
Hmm. I think that a lot of FPSes use the mousewheel for “cycle weapon”. I guess you could have some kind of chording support, but I think that the problem is mostly that there isn’t a free analog input on keyboard+mouse for it.
The other thing would be that you only get one analog axis then, and a lot of games will need two analog axes for analog movement.
I was just reading the other day about some keyboard that apparently had keys with pressure-sensitive switches. I have no idea how many games actually support it, and bet that it’s obscenely expensive, but that’d provide necessary analog inputs, assuming that games add support.
googles
Ah, apparently it’s a thing with “gaming” PC keyboards right now.
You know, honestly, I think that this is at least partly a special case of what a lot of the other comments have asked for, which is basically a more-powerful input layer on the PC sitting between my devices and the game. Like, if I have a bunch of keyboards and joysticks and mice or whatever, let me attach axes and buttons however I want to functions in the game, do macros, whatever.
I had a comment complaining that I had a controller with two extra buttons than a standard XBox controller, but that most games can’t take advantage of that, even though they provide extensive support for rebinding keys on keyboards.
Someone else wanted to be able to bind any input to any game function, wanted macros and stuff.
You’re wanting the ability to link an analog input to existing code in the game that can take an analog value.
Several people have asked for the ability to rebind controller keys.
I also recall seeing, in a past discussion, a handicapped user talk about how the ability to rebind was important to them for accessibility reasons.
that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
While I can understand where you’re coming from, one thing I wonder about – I think that a lot of people want to use the max setting and expect it to work. It’s not unreasonable for a developer to choose ranges such that a max setting doesn’t run reasonably on any current hardware, as doing that may provide for scalability on future hardware. Like, it’s easy for me to make a game that can scale up to future hardware – e.g. try to keep more textures loaded in VRAM than exists on any hardware today, or have shadow resolutions that simply cannot be computed by existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time. But maybe in five years, the hardware can handle it.
If a game developer has the highest-quality across-the-board quality setting not work on any existing system, then I think that you’re going to wind up with people who buy a fancy PC, choose the “max” setting, and then complain “this game isn’t optimized, as I bought expensive hardware and it runs poorly on Ultra/Max/whatever mode”.
But if the game developer doesn’t let the settings go higher, then they’re hamstringing people who might be using the software five or ten years down the line.
I think that one might need a “maximum reasonable on existing hardware” setting or something like that.
I’ve occasionally seen “Insane” with a recommendation that effectively means something like that, “this doesn’t run on any existing hardware well, but down the line, it might”. But I suspect that there are people who are still going to choose that setting and be unhappy if it doesn’t perform well.
I think that one issue is that – at least with Steam, and I think on consoles, though I haven’t checked the current gen – if there’s an outstanding update for a game, one is required to wait until an update is applied before playing the game.
That often really doesn’t need to happen. One could have a console just let one play what’s already download, and when an update can be done, do it.
This doesn’t solve things for multiplayer games – or, more-generally, games with some level of online functionality. There, updates may require everyone to be running the latest version, or Twitter support may be broken on an older version (come to think of it, I bet that all that Twitter removal of third-party API access probably broke a bunch of games with social media integration).
And sometimes, like with actively-exploited security holes, a developer may really, really not want people to use existing versions.
Maybe let the developer flag an update as “mandatory” and only force updates if the “mandatory” flag is set.
One other thing that might solve your problem – I haven’t looked at current-gen consoles, but at least the last time I looked at an XBox, I believe that there was an option for it to turn itself on nightly, check for updates, and for installed games, download and install any updates. That might address your “I turn on my console about once a year and then it has a huge backlog” issue, if your console has that and you toggle on that nightly update setting.
Rewinding is technically possible, and there are games that incorporate rewinding into the game, like Braid or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Probably some newer ones. However, that only works if the game developer conforms to a lot of constraints. I don’t think that it will ever be a standard feature on all video games.
Not all functions are “reversible”; you can’t just run everything “backwards” easily on a general-purpose computer. One specific operation that is famously not-easily-reversible – and that we are so confident that this is not easily reversible that we make a lot of computer security rely on it – is multiplying two prime numbers together. So you’d have to impose dramatic constraints on how games can be written to provide the ability to just say “start running the game in reverse”. (Related trivia: the question of whether the real world can theoretically be run in reverse if you could look perfectly at everything in the universe for just one moment, the arrow of time, is, as I understand it, something of an open question in physics.)
One tactic for “rewinding” is to basically store checkpoints periodically and then retain enough information, like the player’s inputs, such that one can basically “fast forward” from a checkpoint. If you can “fast forward” cheaply enough in terms of CPU time, then rewinding to a checkpoint, and then fast-forwarding to a given point, once for each frame, looks like you’re running in reverse. This is basically how modern movie codecs work today: you have keyframes that are basically a “checkpoint” of a frame that are stored, maybe every few seconds or so. Then you have information necessary to compute the next frame from the existing one. So when you seek backwards in a movie, internally what a movie player is likely doing is seeking backwards to the keyframe prior to the time where you’re trying to seek to, then playing forward. That “seek back to a checkpoint, then play forward” is a lot more technically-easy to do than to require a game to truly be reversible, since in many games, it’s possible to store a fairly-small amount of information to record the game world at that point in time – and “play forward”. But many games also can’t store their entire world in a small amount of space, and for some, it’s hard to perform saves cheaply-enough in terms of CPU time – constantly and frequently-enough, maybe every couple seconds. If you can’t reduce the game state to a very small amount of information, then you are only going to be able to rewind so far. Implementing this is, today a requirement of a number of multiplayer games – nearly all multiplayer game engines basically rely on each computer involved being able to deterministically generate the same world state on each participating computer. One technique to reduce apparent latency to other players is to do client-side prediction, predict what the other user is going to do, like continuing to walk in the same direction that they’re walking, and then render each frame as if they had done that. Sometimes, that prediction is incorrect, and in those cases, they’re going to need to be able to re-generate the world state; what they do is constantly internally checkpoint and then roll world state forward by replaying inputs when they actually learn what that other player was doing. So some games and game engines already basically implement the internal functionality required for this sort of approach, at least over a limited period of time. But it requires the developers to constrain what they do throughout the game to some degree.
I would guess that loading screens will never fully go away. Especially on consoles, where everyone has a fixed set of hardware resources, and the developer knows what that is and is aiming at optimizing for that target, being able to fully remove one area from memory before loading the next gives you potentially twice as much memory to work with. That’s a big-enough gain that game developers are not going to want to give that up, since the alternative is being able to only have half (or less, if multiple areas are near each other) the complexity for their areas. If hardware gets more memory, at least some developers are going to want to increase the complexity of the environments they have rather than eliminating load screens. Otherwise, their scenes are going to look significantly-worse than their competitors who have loading screens.
There may be specific games that eliminate loading screens, at least other than the initial startup of the game. Loading screens might be shorter, or might just consist of a brief fade. But I don’t think that we’ll ever reach the point that all developers decide that that tradeoff to fully-eliminate loading screens is one that they want to make.
The shift from optical media and rotational drives to SSDs has reduced the relative cost of loading an area. But it hasn’t eliminated it.
I think that a necessary condition for loading screens going away is basically a shift to a memory architecture where only a single type of storage exists – that is, you don’t have fast-but-volatile primary storage and slow-but-nonvolatile secondary storage, but only a single form of non-volatile storage that is fast-enough to run from directly. We don’t have that technology today. Even then, it might not kill loading screens, since you might want to have different representations (more-efficient but less-compact for the area surrounding the character, and less-efficient but more-compact for inactive areas).
I think that part of the problem in the case of Caves of Qud is that traditionally, the roguelike genre was aimed at having relatively-quick runs. So losing a run isn’t such a big deal. Your current character is expendable. But many roguelike games – like Caves of Qud – have, as they’ve gotten ever-bigger and gotten ever-more-extensive late games, had much, much longer runs. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead can have a character easily last for weeks or even months of real time. If you sink that much time into a character, having them die becomes, I think, less-palatable to most players. So there’s an incentive to shift towards the RPG model of “death is not permanent; it just throws you back to the last save”.
Just as some roguelikes have had longer runs, some games in the genre have intentionally headed in the direction of shorter runs – the “coffee break roguelike”. The problem there is that roguelikes have also historically had a lot of interacting game mechanics in building out a character, and if you put a ten-minute cap or so on a run, that sharply limits the degree of complexity that can come up over any given run for a character.
What game genre would you like to see more entrants in? angielski
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
Valve detail their plans to combat Steam Deck OLED scalpers (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Did anyone get the Limited Edition OLED Steam Deck
I’m just curious if anyone else tried to get one of the Limited Edition Steam Decks before they sold out. I tried for it (on 3 devices) but kept getting error messages until it sold out. I just ordered the 1 TB edition instead....
Caves of Qud’s “Creatures of the 7th Plague” Update Released (youtu.be)
Live and drink, water-sibs
The Escapist staff resign following termination of editor-in-chief Nick Calandra (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Calandra shared more information on Discord, revealing that the “entire video team” has resigned in response....
[Discussion] Games you forgot you had
The other day my son was messing around on my PS4. He went into the library and launched Geometry Wars³: Dimensions....
Xbox's new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error '0x82d60002' (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/ajgMB...
How has Cities:Skylines II been for you?
Just looking to gather opinions and thoughts from this community that were thinking of trying C:S II now that the game is out publicly....
Discovery Freelancer Multiplayer - Official v5.0 Release Gameplay Trailer (youtu.be)
Freelancer is one of my favourite games, and Discovery is my favourite Freelancer mod. Thought you fine folks might want to take a look at the trailer they’ve just put out....
Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
When was a game's price worth it to you?
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games? angielski
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....